Two server setup for online store(Magento)

Question

I'm developing an online store with Magento. The site will be high traffic and will need a two server setup, Testing and Production.

My question is how do online stores, specifically Magento handle this?

The idea I had is:

• Take Production site offline
• Empty Testing database
• Copy data from Production database. (Maybe )
• Test
• Copy files and database to Production site

I know Magento offers a Enterprise option, but this is a script I would like to write myself.

Answer 1

You should not need to take the production site offline.

What I would sugest (and you should be able to script this) is on the production site to run mysqldump -u root -ppassword db_name > db_name.sql to produce a copy of the database. then run rsync (you can get it for both linux and windows) on the files directory to rsync to the test machine any files you want to copy (images?)

After you do any testing on your that you wish to push to production you can do it one of 2 ways. either (and I prefer this method) save any changes you made to the database in a sql file and run that on the production site and at the same time sync back any changed files. or you can use mysql to log all queries to a file, then re-play these on the production site.

Best not to take the production site down if you dont need to.

Answer 2

You want master/slave mySQL with the slave reading from the slave database but writing to the live. This can be setup in the local.xml file. You should be able to run rsync for the files, with --exclude for the var/session and var/cache files. Also you may want to --exclude the logo if it is a development server. The logo can then be changed to say 'test' so you don't confuse it with Live.

Answer 3

Actually, if you make changes to the database, you will need to take the site offline (even for just a few seconds) while you switch from the old code to the new code, and run the database migration script.

You might be interested to know that

• postgres has transactional DDL : if you wrap your migration script in a transaction and something breaks in the middle, the whole thing is rolled back (including DROP TABLE)

• postgres doesn't need to rewrite the table to add a column (MySQL does and it's pretty slow)

• if you use MyISAM you are doomed for many reasons, one of them being that doing backups will take your site offline for a few minutes.